Monday, December 28, 2009

Would you like to come on a trip to a magical imaginary world? Well then, join Rahm Emanuel and his reporter sidekick Jonathan Weisman aboard this Wall Street Journal article:

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has been telling Democrats a win on the health issue will reverse the slide in public opinion, just as passage of another controversial proposal, the North American Free Trade Agreement, lifted President Bill Clinton in the polls...

In an interview Friday, Mr. Emanuel expressed little concern for the president's standing with the Democratic base. Mr. Emanuel said the liberal wing of the party is already coming back to the fold.

This would be a bizarre thing for Emanuel to be telling other Democrats under any circumstances: NAFTA passed at the end of 1993 in Clinton's first year, and then in 1994 the Democrats promptly lost control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate—the House for the first time in forty years. You wouldn't think hearing Emanuel compare today to that would really get Democrats to break out the champagne.

There is an awful lot of historical nonsense being spread around these days on all sides but this one really takes the cake. NAFTA was the quintessential DLC experiment and is the worst possible example of Clinton's legislative success at this particularmoment. It was a business elite wet dream, advocated by the party of the working class against the interests of its own constituents. And the numbers in the links above show that it was actually quite unpopular and that whatever small bump Clinton got (probably for his "bipartisanship" more than anything else) were ephemeral. After all, he lost both houses of congress in the next election. I think Rahm should probably be careful about drawing such comparisons right now. They don't exactly inspire confidence.